2008 Wrap-Up

This year marked my first foray to the Toronto International Film Festival — something I likely won’t repeat in 2009, for unrelated reasons — leading to a record number of films watched (315). It was also the year that I made a concerted effort to realign my grading system; I wanted to shape the grade distribution into a steeper bell curve, so that A’s, A-’s and B+’s would designate something special, and B’s a hearty recommendation. The result: a record low number of good grades, but a better, finer-grained measure of my positions on the films.

There were no Masterpiece films in 2008, but still plenty of reward for discerning filmgoers. It’s also the first year in recent memory where I don’t intensely dislike any of the major Oscar contenders, unless Australia or Defiance somehow sneak through. And it looks like the odds-on Best Picture favorite is also my pick for film of the year. Weird.

The Ten Worst Films of 2008

10. Rocknrolla (Guy Ritchie) – I swear I didn’t contrive it so that a Guy Ritchie film would take the #10 slot on this list two years in a row. His movies really do suck this much. Rocknrolla is less batshit insane than Revolver, but just as viscerally repulsive. Now that Ritchie and Madonna are divorced, could he go away?

9. What Happens in Vegas (Tom Vaughan) – A particularly intolerable going-through-the-motions PG-13 romantic comedy — the kind that can’t manage either an instant of wit or any relationship to reality. You can’t sentence people to marriage. It doesn’t make any sense.

8. Nobel Son (Randall Miller) – I probably shouldn’t have bothered, but the notion of Alan Rickman as a hyper-arrogant Nobel Laureate was more than I could resist. Someone should have forcibly kept me away. I’m particularly sensitive to the sort of hip “outrageousness” this movie peddles, but it’s stupid and boring by any standard.

7. Shutter (Masayuki Ochiai) – This is a particularly tedious and unimaginative J-horror remake, but I can’t really explain why it’s on this list without giving away the surreally dumb ending. It’s almost enough to recommend the film to curious horror and B-movie buffs, but no one else.

6. Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D (Eric Brevig) – I’m stunned that people tolerated this in the name of some sort of nostalgia for “old-fashioned” adventure yarns. What nonsense. There’s not a single moment of wonder or awe in this by-the-numbers theme park ride of a movie. And Disney’s Bolt — though itself mediocre — offered a far lovelier and more impressive 3-D demonstration.

5. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (Uwe Boll) – With luck, the last Uwe Boll film to ever see a mainstream theatrical release. The man is like an alien trying and failing to understand human behavior. Favorite moment: our heroes come upon a secure wizarding stronghold. How secure? “The doors lock from within.”

4. Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet) – There was surely no bigger narrative trainwreck in 2008. Like many, I thought I’d tolerate a lot to see a De Niro-Pacino reunion, but this was beyond me. Only attempt if you’re cool with pointless misdirection and totally incomprehensible plot twists.

3. 10,000 B.C. (Roland Emmerich) – I’ve had just about enough of a) prehistoric epics, and b) Roland Emmerich-directed “spectacles.” (The forthcoming 2012 can go to hell.) Never thought that Mel Gibson would seem like a genius alongsideanyone, but 2007′s Pathfinder and this film make Apocalypto seem like a timeless masterpiece.

2. The Air I Breathe (Jieho Lee) – Consider the cast — Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Emile Hirsch, Kevin Bacon, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar — and then consider how obscure The Air I Breathe is. And then think about why that might be. Hint: it’s not because the movie’s a demanding arthouse masterpiece.

1. Made of Honor (Paul Weiland) – What’s telling is the title, which is entirely inexplicable. It’s a pun without a double meaning, unless “Made” is intended to be the masculine version of “Maid”. (And no, the movie does not feature a character named “Made,” and the plot does not involve the mob.) If it seems impossible that a mainstream, generously budgeted Hollywood film could reach theaters with a completely nonsensical title, you haven’t seen the rest of Made of Honor, which is every bit as impossible. Frankly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

The Ten Best Films of 2008

10. Body of Lies (Ridley Scott) – An elegant, beautifully constructed thriller, and the smartest film to date about the War on Terror. Certainly it’s the most nuanced picture Hollywood has painted of Middle East volatility, at once pro-American (the film sees Islamic extremism as a true existential threat) and deeply critical (the problem with Iraq, etc., is our arrogance and lack of engagement). Clearly too smart and subtle for the masses, given its box office returns, though I thought it was rather breathlessly exciting.

9. The Midnight Meat Train (Ryuhei Kitamura) – Here I’ll lose many of you, but you have to understand that I’m forever looking for horror films that are in tune with my sensibilities. This one is just about perfect. Moody and beautiful (I mean that — the film has some of the most gorgeous cinematography the genre has ever seen), meticulously constructed, with a real moral dimension and a plot that gradually opens up instead of narrowing down, The Midnight Meat Train is everything a good horror movie should be. (And the gorehounds won’t be disappointed either, though interestingly the film actually tones down the gore as it goes along.)

8. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme) – Took me two viewings to get a handle on this wonderful film. It is incredibly difficult to write a screenplay that is both this witty and this naturalistic; one that approximates real life this closely while maintaining dramatic shape. Stunning performances from Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie Dewitt and Bill Irwin; artful and unassuming work from Jonathan Demme; a heartbreaking rumination on guilt, mistakes, love and family.

7. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky) – In which Darren Aronofsky showed that he can make a compelling, deeply moving film that is not also a Clint Mansell-dominated mood piece. Pitched as a conventional underdog flick, but also determined to undermine and confound convention, making the glory our hero seeks to recapture simultaneously his downfall and his salvation. Has several of the year’s most memorable moments, most of them thanks to Mickey Rourke’s completely singular performance; also boasts the second-best final shot of the year.

6. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton) – There’s no point in even setting expectations for Pixar these days. For example, I fully anticipated that Wall-E would be sweet and wonderful, but it didn’t occur to me that Pixar would produce some of the finest science-fiction in recent years. People swooned over the Wall-E-EVE love story, but I found that just slightly maudlin; the film’s consumer-culture satire, on the other hand, positing a future where humanity is lulled into sedentary complacency by a corporate-sponsored life of plenty, struck me as trenchant and exceptionally daring in a family film. It’s about humans, not robots, and it’s full of hope and love.

5. Flame & Citron (Ole Christian Madsen) – Turned out that no one gave a damn about this one, which is a shame; this is the rare WWII movie that doesn’t play it safe, with extraordinary results. Like an unholy blend of spy thriller, noir and comic book movie, Flame & Citron is gorgeous, hyper-stylized, and sometimes downright Lynchian. For people who are bored by bland, inoffensive historical dramas, and prefer their movies assertive and bold.

4. Let the Right One In (Thomas Alfredson) – The most disturbing film of the year, and not because of the much-ballyhooed burst of gore in the climax. What got me was Let the Right One In‘s sneaky, subtle — but unmistakable — suggestion that its heroes are actually deeply cruel, deeply rotten, and so made for each other (hence the title). A melancholy love story, and a nifty vampire film, what what really sticks are the pitch-black undercurrents, and what the movie tells us about the nature of its characters.

3. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan) – A superhero movie where the superhero is almost an afterthought. Even within the story, Batman is just a symbol. This is a movie about our country, the rule of law, and human nature. It’s epic, and exciting, and endlessly imaginative. It’s like watching The Godfather for the first time.

2. The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy) – The film’s stance on illegal immigration — and the message that laws that sometimes seem abstract nonetheless affect real people in a very real way — is all well and good. But the heart of the film, I think, is in Richard Jenkins’ protagonist, who emerges from his apathetic, insular shell and learns to engage with the world around him. (This is why the complaint that The Visitor is a film about quirky immigrants who teach the white guy how to live are so misguided — their skin color and nationality is basically irrelevant.) Sentimental and fairly earnest, but also intelligent and masterfully constructed; for once, the tears are earned.

1. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle) – Everyone seemed to recognize that this is a fairy tale, though some used that term derisively. Some objected to the fairy-tale-izing of real people’s awful plight. Nonsense. Fairy tales are serious business, and Slumdog Millionaire is as horrifying as it is fantastical. That it’s also rousing and convincingly triumphant is a tribute to its storytelling. This is why we have movies.

Slumdog Millionaire

Some honorable mentions (in rough order of preference): The Promotion, Boy A,Redbelt, Doubt, Bigger Stronger Faster*: The Side Effects of Being American, My Blueberry Nights, Transsiberian, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, FrontRunners, Easy Virtue, Milk, A Girl Cut in Two,Hancock, Iron Man, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Other Boleyn Girl, Charlie Bartlett, Days and Clouds, Chop Shop, The Strangers, Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot,Genova, Igor, Timecrimes, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,Shuttle, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Run Fatboy Run, Penelope.

Overrated: Tell No One (Guillaume Canet) – This movie is just straight-up stupid, in the most conventional, frequently-scoffed-at way possible, which makes the effusive, near-universal praise all the more puzzling: is it just that the characters speak French and that the director is a guy named “Guillaume”? Potentially nifty premise eventually drags to a banal, nonsensical conclusion more than two hours later; meanwhile, the movie strives to come up with as many contrived, artificial ways to withhold information from you as it can. Everyone had a collective brain fart; stay away.

Also: Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About a Father, Wendy and Lucy, The Wackness, I’ve Loved You So Long, Elegy, Kung Fu Panda, Quantum of Solace,Hunger, Flight of the Red Balloon, Choke, The Band’s Visit, Teeth, Tropic Thunder,Towelhead, Adam Resurrected, Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D.

Underappreciated: The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Chris Carter) – Subdued, lovely, perfectly appropriate closure for the fans — and a freaky, classic Frankenstein plot as a bonus. I guess I understand the negative reaction to I Want to Believe from the world at large, since unlike Fight the Future, this one really was more-or-less strictly for the fans; that said, I think the fans should have been kinder to this terrific film that does justice to the franchise’s wonderful protagonists.

Also: The Promotion, Hancock, The Other Boleyn Girl, Charlie Bartlett, Igor, Run Fatboy Run, Penelope, Speed Racer, Deadgirl, Pathology, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Meet Bill, The Express, The Rocker, Cassandra’s Dream, How She Move, Vantage Point, The Happening.

Performance of the Year: Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married. A profound and unassuming work of genius, Irwin’s turn as the tragic family patriarch in Rachel Getting Married is the richest, most generous performance of the year. Paul Buckman is a real, complicated man, and his fifty-some years of history are right there on the screen, in Irwin’s elastic mug, his manic gesturing (Paul’s defense mechanism, we sense), his oddly distant eyes. Paul’s reaction to his oldest daughter announcing her pregnancy — bunny-hopping over to her in the background of the shot, beside himself — is one of the year’s most indelible movie moments.

Runner-Up: Sean Penn in Milk.

And a Few Movie Moments I’ll Still Remember in 10 Years:

- Slumdog Millionaire‘s closing credits.

- The big payoff to the running joke at the end of The Promotion.

- Randy the Ram enjoying himself behind the deli counter in The Wrestler.

- Elizabeth Abbott swims the English Channel in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

- Jack Burridge leaves a voicemail for his friend in Boy A.

- Penelope Stamp demonstrates her DJing skills in The Brothers Bloom.

- Peter Bretter performs a song from his Dracula puppet musical at a Hawaiian bar in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

- Chris Bell hunts down Arnold Schwarzenegger for a combative interview and winds up with a star-struck photo op in Bigger Stronger Faster*.

- Paul Buckman reacts to his daughter’s pregnancy in Rachel Getting Married.

- Flame infiltrates a Kraut hotel in Flame & Citron

- Walter Vale plays the drum in the subway station in The Visitor.

- Dale Denton improvises a fake name for his girlfriend in Pineapple Express

- Indiana Jones goes into one car window and out the other in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

- Father Flynn is accused in Doubt.

- Laura Black stumbles into a jujitsu studio in Redbelt.